I've been using fully Claude Opus 4.1 in my terminal setup for coding, reasoning, and agent-like tasks. it's been solid for complex workflows. But now that Sonnet 4.5 is out, I'm wondering if I should switch. From benchmarks, it seems to match or beat Opus in areas like coding (higher scores on SWE-Bench and agentic tasks), visual reasoning, and handling nuanced instructions with better efficiency for iterative sessions. If you've tried both in a CLI/terminal environment, what's your take? Does Sonnet hold up for deep reasoning and long-chain planning, or does Opus still edge it out there?

For complex workflows, would you recommend switching? Experiences appreciated!

How are people genuinely praising Claude Code Sonnet 4.5? I have no idea what’s happening…but from my experience it’s pretty disappointing. Sorry if that stings, but I’m honestly curious about what others see in it.

I’m speaking as someone who uses Claude Code daily easily 7+ hours per day and who has been deeply involved with it since the beginning. I consider myself a power user and truly understand the capabilities it should have. Maybe I’m missing something crucial here…but BESIDES that point I’m really dissatisfied and frustrated with Anthropic right now.

On top of that, the marketing hype around Sonnet 4.5 feels like the same garbage AI slot promotion we saw everywhere with ChatGPT lol. It’s being marketed as the “best model in the world,” likely to people who barely even scratch its surface.

I’ve also just hit a usage limit on Opus 4.1. I’m on the max 200 plan and now there’s some kind of cap in place…for what, a week? Why? If Sonnet is sooooo good why are they placing weekly limits on opus 4.1? So stupid. Can someone explain what’s going on here?

With Opus 4.1 limits reaching in just about 5 hours of work, is the Sonnet 4.5 model even as good as opus in coding tasks?

I had some time to check out the sonnet 4.5 model (accidentally, as claude automatically switched my model from opus to sonnet), it handled planning pretty well, but not sure of the execution as it made some Average UI. Immediately hit on rewind once I realized it was sonnet working, as I don't usually trust the model in the first few days of it's release, at least not until I have read reviews about it. Opus killed it, but it killed the limit too.

What's your experience with Sonnet 4.5?

Anthropic says the sonnet 4.5 is the smartest model out there outperforming opus 4.1 . I switched to newer model thinking well it should be better. However yesterday when using it sonnet has wasted my time unable finding a bug (4-5 prompts), while opus 4.1 found it with one prompt. it was a simple bug where I had to remove '_' from the string inside.

the opus 4.1 seems to be more attentive to details than sonnet . it seems sonnet is more logical, the way it writes code, what approaches uses.